ECL announced that CSC1, its 35 MW FlexGrid-powered data center in Santa Clara, Calif., is fully committed across three tenants, with deployment beginning in Q1 2027 and completion expected by Q3/Q4 2027.

Full Commitment Eight Months After Announcement

The three tenants, described as established AI cloud platforms and inference-focused startups backed by leading AI research organizations, are deploying AI inference workloads at the facility.

CSC1 reached full commitment just eight months after its April 2026 announcement and before construction is complete. The company attributes the speed to its modular block architecture and behind-the-meter power generation, which deliver a purchase-order-to-keys timeline of nine to 12 months in metro markets, compared to the two to three years typical of conventional grid-dependent data center development.

Industry Context: Power Constraints and Surging Demand

The announcement comes amid mounting pressure on data center power supply. 451 Research projects that US data center electricity demand will almost triple in the next five years, reaching about 183.2 GW by the end of 2030, while Bloomberg reports that half of all US data center projects this year face delays or cancellations due to power constraints.

"Every major AI operator in the Bay Area is doing the same math right now, weighing years-long interconnection queues against inference demand that compounds monthly," said Yuval Bachar, co-founder and CEO of ECL.

"These three tenants chose CSC1 because FlexGrid gets them to production in months, not years. They are deploying next quarter instead of waiting for a utility to approve a substation."

Bachar added that inference has to be located close to people, data, and applications, often in and around major cities where 50 or 100 spare megawatts rarely exist on the grid.

Facility Specifications and FlexGrid Power Architecture

CSC1 supports rack densities up to 150kW at launch, with an architecture designed to accommodate future densities up to 250kW and beyond as tenant requirements evolve. The facility is ready for NVIDIA GB300 and Vera Rubin architectures, with direct-to-chip liquid cooling and a sub-1.15 PUE.

FlexGrid combines up to 5MW of on-grid electricity, up to 30 MW of natural gas generation through microturbines and fuel cells, and up to 5MW of hydrogen power, with battery systems providing transient control and backup.

The power mix can shift over time based on operational needs and energy market conditions, and the facility's architecture requires no redesign when fuel sources change.

Supply Chain and Cooling Innovations

ECL's modular block architecture is designed to eliminate several supply chain bottlenecks that slow conventional builds. The design sources many smaller components rather than a few large ones, such as utility-scale transformers, which now carry lead times exceeding 120 weeks. This enables ECL to use a different supply chain than traditional data center operators.

The company builds blocks in parallel and omits conventional UPS systems, further compressing the construction cycle. Tenants can begin running production workloads in early blocks while later phases are still under construction.

On the cooling side, when hydrogen is used as a FlexGrid power source, byproduct water from fuel cell generation supplies the cooling loop, eliminating the freshwater draw that increasingly concerns data center operators in drought-prone California. The facility's cooling architecture combines direct-to-chip, air, and hydrogen byproduct water-based systems and is designed for Tier III-level reliability.

Next Sites: CSJ1, CSU1, and CSU2

ECL has simultaneously opened three additional sites, CSJ1, CSU1, and CSU2, for tenant inquiries. CSJ1 is named as the next site in ECL's planned distributed inference network across the Bay Area.

The three sites will follow the same FlexGrid architecture and are designed for inference-dense AI workloads at 25-35 MW scale. Prospective tenants can contact ECL directly through its website for capacity planning and early site engagement.

Company Background

ECL is a next-generation data center company focused on building high-density, AI-ready facilities that can be deployed where traditional power infrastructure falls short.

Its FlexGrid microgrid architecture and ECL Lightning real-time management platform combine grid power, natural gas, batteries, and hydrogen fuel cells to deliver power tailored to AI and inference workloads.

ECL introduced the world's first operational hydrogen-powered AI data center at its MV-1 site in Mountain View, California, in 2024 and is scaling its FlexGrid architecture across U.S. and international markets. The company is backed by Molex Ventures and Hyperwise Ventures.

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